Determining Dictionary and Usage Guide Agreement with Real-World Usage

107 Pages·2016·1.02 MB·English

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Theses and Dissertations
2014-06-10
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Amanda Kae Fronk
Brigham Young University - Provo
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Determining Dictionary and Usage Guide Agreement with Real-World Usage:
A Diachronic Corpus Study of American English

Amanda Kae Fronk

A thesis submitted to the faculty of
Brigham Young University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts

Mark Davies, Chair
Don W. Chapman
Dallin D. Oaks

Department of Linguistics and English Lamguage
Brigham Young University
June 2014

Copyright © 2014 Amanda Kae Fronk
All Rights Reserved
ABSTRACT
Determining Dictionary and Usage Guide Agreement with Real-World Usage:
A Diachronic Corpus Study of American English

Amanda Kae Fronk
Department of Linguistics, BYU
Master of Arts

Dictionaries and, to a lesser extent, usage guides provide writers, editors, and users of
American English information on how to use the language appropriately. Dictionaries, in
particular, hold authority over correct usage of words. However, historically, usage guides and
dictionaries were created using the knowledge of a small group of people. Lexicographers like
Noah Webster set out to prescribe a proper way of using American English. To make these
judgments, they often relied on a combination of study and idiosyncratic intuitions. A similar
process took place in creating usage guides. Though these manuals profess to explain how the
language is used by American English speakers—or rather by the selected group of speakers
deemed “standard” by usage guide editors and lexicographers—ultimately the manuals can only
express the perspectives of the editors and lexicographers on this language. Historically, the
views of these editors and lexicographers were the best tools available to assess language, but
now computer-based corpora allow for studying larger swaths of language usage.

This study examines how much dictionaries and usage guides agree with real-world
usage found in corpus data. Using the Corpus of Historical American English, a set of
dictionaries and usage guides published throughout the last two hundred years were analyzed to
see how much agreement they had with corpus data in noting the addition of denominal verbs
(i.e., verbs formed by the conversion of nouns as in ‘They taped together the box.’) in American
English usage.

It was found that the majority of the time dictionaries noted new denominal verbs before
corpus data reflected accepted usage of these verbs. However, about a quarter of the time
dictionaries noted new denominal verbs concurrently with the corpus data. These results suggest
that dictionaries—and the subjective opinions of the lexicographers that created them—are more
aligned with real-world usage than would be expected. Because of sparse listings, results for
usage guide agreement was inconclusive.

Key words: usage, Standard English, dictionaries, corpus linguistics, denominal verb, language
change, usage guides
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
More than any other endeavor I have ever undertaken, I have been made aware of a
village of people who have supported me, cheered me on, kept me focused, and sent words of
encouragement. I would like to thank Dr. Mark Davies, whose patience and helpfulness over
years of meetings kept me on target and calmed me through many seasons of feeling incapable.
Drs. Don Chapman and Dallin Oaks both helped me think thoroughly and deeply on my research
as well as kept me focused on the right questions.
To all my friends—specifically Melissa Caldwell, Sara Smith, and Shannon Zirbel—who
showed confidence in me when I was too tired to find my own, thank you. Your texts and
messages were a significant part of getting work done day in and day out.
Lastly, this thesis would never have been finished without my parents. Mom, thanks for
being my constant listening ear, my greatest believer, and my loyal bolster. And Dad—I feel like
we earned this together. Thanks for taking time to understand the nitty gritty of my research, for
being my source of accountability, and for being my sounding board when I didn’t know what to
do next.
iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................................... vi
LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... vii
Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 2: Review of Literature ..................................................................................................... 6
2.1. Seeking a Standard ............................................................................................................... 6
2.2. Noun-to-Verb Conversion .................................................................................................... 7
2.2.1. Conversion ..................................................................................................................... 8
2.2.2. Gradiency and Partial Conversion ................................................................................. 9
2.3. Corpus Research ................................................................................................................. 11
2.3.1. What Are Corpora? ...................................................................................................... 11
2.3.2. Usage and Corpora ...................................................................................................... 12
2.4. Dictionaries ........................................................................................................................ 13
2.4.1. Johnson’s Dictionary ................................................................................................... 13
2.4.2. Webster’s 1828 Dictionary .......................................................................................... 15
2.4.3. From Noah Webster to Merriam-Webster ................................................................... 17
2.4.4. Webster’s Third ........................................................................................................... 18
2.4.5. American Heritage Dictionary..................................................................................... 19
2.5. Usage Guides...................................................................................................................... 21
2.5.1. Brief History of English Language Usage Guides ...................................................... 22
v

2.5.2. Survey of Usage Guides .............................................................................................. 23
Chapter 3: Method ........................................................................................................................ 29
3.1. Establishing Research Items............................................................................................... 29
3.1.1. Determining Established Usage................................................................................... 33
3.2. Gathering Data ................................................................................................................... 34
3.2.1. Corpus .......................................................................................................................... 34
3.2.2. Dictionaries and Usage Guides .................................................................................... 38
3.2.3. Differences of Meanings ............................................................................................. 42
Chapter 4: Results ......................................................................................................................... 44
4.1. Dictionary Data .................................................................................................................. 44
4.2. Graphs ................................................................................................................................ 50
4.3. Exceptional Cases .............................................................................................................. 55
4.4. Usage Guide Data............................................................................................................... 58
Chapter 5: Discussion ................................................................................................................... 59
5.1. Dictionaries ........................................................................................................................ 59
5.2. Usage Guides...................................................................................................................... 68
5.3. Limitations ......................................................................................................................... 77
Chapter 6: Conclusion................................................................................................................... 81
Appendix ....................................................................................................................................... 83
References ..................................................................................................................................... 94
vi

LIST OF TABLES
Table 3.1. Research terms divided by chronological period. ........................................................ 32
Table 3.2. Tokens per 5 million words. ........................................................................................ 33
Table 3.3. Examples of verb constructions. .................................................................................. 36
Table 3.4. Dictionaries used in research. ...................................................................................... 38
Table 3.5. Usage guides used in research. .................................................................................... 39
Table 4.1. Overall results noting difference between the CDE-projected edition and the 1DE. .. 45
Table 4.2. Denominal verbs with the CDE, 1DE, and CDE-Projected Edition, divided
chronologically. ............................................................................................................................ 46
Table 4.3. Denominal verbs that had 1DEs either in complete concordance with the CDE-
projected edition or one edition earlier or later than the CDE-projected edition. ......................... 49
Table 4.4. Denominal verbs with large disparity between the CDE and 1DE. ............................. 53
Table 5.1. Denominal verbs that have 1DEs earlier than the CDE-projected editions. ................ 59
Table 5.2. Denominal verbs with large disparity between 1DE and CDE-projected edition. ...... 65
Table 5.3a. Instances of denominal verbs listed in usage guides published between 1856 and
1932............................................................................................................................................... 71
Table 5.4b. Instances of denominal verbs listed in usage guides published between 1957 and
2009............................................................................................................................................... 73
Table 5.5. Dictionary Publication Dates. ...................................................................................... 79
vii

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 4.1. Overall results using numerical labelling of data. ...................................................... 50
Figure 4.2. Results for 1860–1909. ............................................................................................... 51
Figure 4.3. Results for 1910–1959. ............................................................................................... 51
Figure 4.4. Results for 1960–2009. ............................................................................................... 52
1

Chapter 1: Introduction
At the reference desk at almost any public library in the United States can be found a
large open volume displaying packed pages of small print. The volume is the dictionary—most
likely a Merriam-Webster dictionary—and the words on the thin pages are a definitional catalog
of an entire language. The dictionary’s prominent place in libraries as well as in schools and
even home bookcases suggests the respect American English speakers have for this work. For
many, the dictionary is the source of correct language use, at least as far as accurate vocabulary
and spelling is concerned. A game of Scrabble cannot be played without hearing a phrase like “Is
that word in the dictionary?” Likewise, it is to the dictionary that English speakers go in order to
determine if they have the right definition for infer or whether it is appropriate to use a newly
coined word like Instagramming in a job application (e.g., ‘I have broad experience in social
media marketing, including managing Facebook accounts and Instagramming company photo
contests.’). Even the US Government Printing Office had a simple rule that may best showcase
the command the dictionary had and continues to have in America: “Follow Webster” (quoted in
Leavitt 1947:67).
Respect for the authority of dictionaries is a long-held tradition passed down from
teachers and editors and writers—a tradition that has also spurred the creation of other
authoritative volumes that suggest rules of proper speech. Grammars, style guides, and usage
guides all provide rules on how to use the English language correctly.
Though these works hold great authority, how much do they align with actual usage? The
purpose of this thesis is to track whether or not usage materials (i.e., dictionaries and usage
guides) over the last two hundred years agree with real-world language found in corpora in
noting language change related to the particular phenomenon of noun-to-verb conversion. Noun-
2

to-verb conversion is a word formation process that creates new verbs, called denominal verbs,
from nouns (e.g. ‘She co-authored the article with three other professors.’). This research tracks
when denominal verbs occur for the first time in dictionaries and usage guides compared to when
corpus data shows consistent usage of the denominal verbs.
The label usage seems to be a bit of a misnomer. The term suggests a description of how
something is generally used, but more often than not usage, when applied to language, actually
refers to the usage of a subset of the mass of English speakers. In fact, the editors of usage guides
and dictionaries, until recently, worked as solo cataloguers of what they idiosyncratically ruled
was the right usage. The landmark American Dictionary of the English Language was not the
compilation of vocabulary used by all Americans in 1828; rather, it was a listing of words that
Noah Webster alone had determined—albeit through a well-researched and systematic process—
was the proper inventory of American English. Webster and many other dictionary and usage
guide creators compiled their works based on the speech of educated persons. But even in
describing the usage of this smaller group, how accurate can a solitary dictionary editor be in
composing a true consensus of how educated speakers use the language?
To be fair, when Webster and other editors were creating their dictionaries and usage
guides in the nineteenth century and later even into the twentieth century, any kind of
comprehensive description of a large population was much more difficult. Inventions of mass
communication were either nonexistent or new, making it difficult to conduct large-scale polls
on language use. Even with these polls, gathering data for every single word in the English
language would still be impossible. Computer and internet language research could not be
conducted until the late twentieth century. Until recently, the best tools dictionary and usage
guide editors had were libraries and their own intuitions.